


Madstone

by Notaricon



Series: Madstone [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Anders' Electricity Trick, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Complicated Relationships, Dragon Age Kink Meme, Identity Issues, Kink Meme, Lyrium, Lyrium Kink, M/M, Magic, Other, Sass and Fatigue, Slow Burn, Slow To Update, Synesthesia, The Fade, Under revision, Voice Kink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-05-03
Updated: 2011-05-25
Packaged: 2017-10-18 22:50:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/194156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notaricon/pseuds/Notaricon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You can never return to what you were. What will you do with the thing you've become?</i>
</p><p>Justice, Anders, Fenris and Lyrium.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Calcinatio

**Author's Note:**

> Endless thanks to my stunning betas, [ballades](http://ballades.livejournal.com/) and [spicyshimmy](http://spicyshimmy.livejournal.com/). Without their patient assistance, this mess would not be happening.

The air was stale and smelled of boiled weeds and the warm, slow-rising damp rolling in from the coast. There had barely been a ghost of sound to alert them to the coming danger; a soft, chitinous snickering that seemed to come as much from their wary footsteps as from the whispering shadows.

It had been Isabela who’d cast the first blow, dancing on the balls of her soft-booted feet like a spectre, her bright eyes glittering and not unlike those of a child playing hide-and-seek as her blade cut a silver streak through the air, striking something slick and plump and unseen with a dull thud. In that moment, the caverns had erupted around them, screeching and chittering, a blur of bristled hair and far too many scything limbs.

He knew-- _they knew_ \--that this battle could only end in victory. These were base creatures, the far corners of his mind rumbled; _in their foulness and infirmity, they would crumble before the strength of Hawke’s resolve_. There was a steadfast comrade to be found in that man, he thought, for all that the grinning apostate sometimes reminded them... _him_... of what he once had been. For all that he sometimes kept company that made Anders’ teeth itch. For all that Anders was forced to share that company. Hawke was a leader; the leader the mages of Kirkwall--of Thedas--desperately needed. A man blessed both with potent magic and charisma.

So Anders fought. It was Justice’s arm which swung his staff, felling their enemies by its wicked blade without need for eyes as Anders channelled wild magic around them, tainting the air with the seared tang of ozone and the stink of melting flesh.

He hardly felt the ticklish rush of air at his back, when it came, nor the way another body aligned itself behind his.

“A mage who wields his weapon like a knight. Wonders never cease.” _Fenris_. The soft, bitter tones of the man’s voice were still just unfamiliar enough to chill his skin, rising so suddenly from behind him. They stood back to back, the spines of the elf’s armour shifting like the scales of a snake whenever he altered his stance. _Such company as this_. Men who scorned and despised all that he and Hawke were; free mages, who did not fear to stand beside their fellows as equals, who held their heads high as they worked their arcane arts, who dared to desire such things as _safety, comfort, family_. How could he--

_“Anders!”_

Hawke. A quavering crack threading his voice: wounded, but not badly. Still _quite_ able to shout. Anders came back to himself amid a heap of monstrous, oozing corpses, gingerly, mindlessly prodding a weirdly hinged leg with the butt of his staff. There was no ebbing fever in Anders’ skin; no cold light blistering his eyes. He had only lost himself to his thoughts.

“So.” He turned to face the others, a funny, weary little smile kinking up his lips. “Who needs healing?”

\---

They crouched against the slick cavern walls, idle small-talk flitting in murmurs between them as Anders shuffled from one to the next, healing magics a cold nimbus around his fingers.

The elf had taken the worst of it, battling face-to-face the things the rest of them attacked from behind or afar. _Yet_ , a growling chill rose to whisper from the ever-swirling mists in the back of his mind, _yet he sits aside and does not think to demand healing_. Some part of Anders ached, when the inhuman scrabbling in his head stilled enough to reclaim some of the gentle wonder that had, against all odds, made Justice a friend to him in days past. It vanished as surely as smoke when the elf caught his gaze and snarled. _Even beasts and demons may project the illusion of nobility._

Isabela’s booted toes prodded his shoulder. “I like the view over there as much as anyone, sweet thing, but I don’t much appreciate being ignored.”

He blanched and looked up into her blossoming smirk, his hands still clasped around her wrenched ankle, the spell he’d been conjuring fizzling slowly out. She lounged against Hawke’s side, elbow draped over his thigh as though it were the arm of a throne. His eyes shifted to Hawke, who smiled noncommittally and tugged at the ruff of his beard. Isabela’s heel landed lightly atop his shoulder. She cooed and rolled her foot, her uninjured ankle popping. “Ooh, _cushy_. You know, while you’re down there...”

Anders sent a crackling wave of static racing along her skin, just under the cool burst that set her wound, dusting off and donning a wry grin of his own. It went on a bit wan, he felt, but he compensated with a colourful quirk of his brows. She threw her head back against Hawke’s robed shoulder and barked a laugh like the lash of a whip.

“Problem?” Anders purred. She nudged his chin with the point of her boot.

“I like him. He’s cheeky.”

“He’s kneeling right here.”

“ _Oh, yes_. About that--“

“ _Isabela_ ,” Hawke interjected. “You’ll give away all our well-laid plans of seduction.”

Anders had learned to quash the bleak swell of hope that surfaced whenever the possibility of human contact presented itself. _The bodies of mortals were curious things, to crave such closeness. What purpose could it serve?_

His smile faltered only slightly. The questioning flicker in Hawke’s eyes stated clearly that he’d noticed, regardless. Neither of them said a word.

“Is no one going to see to the handsome elf glowering in the corner, then?” Isabela mused as she tested her newly-healed ankle. Her dark brows soared suggestively high. “I know _I’d_ like to.”

Hawke turned his face into her hair and snorted, chuckling, “I think Anders might be afraid of the big, bad, brooding elf.” His warm amber eyes glinted. “You never know, Anders. He could be a cuddly bunny rabbit, at heart.”

“A murderous bunny rabbit, perhaps. Are you trying to send me to an early grave?” Anders shook his head and let his smile drop, running a hand through his mussed hair and idly hoping no one noted the way it trembled. “It hardly matters. You saw the way he chased me off.”

Hawke leant his head against the craggy cavern wall, the pitch of his voice suddenly stronger than it had been before. _A voice like ringing iron; a champion’s voice_ , the mist in his head noted. “Fenris. Have you been injured?”

The elf stirred, his head canting to the side like an animal’s. “There is no need--“

Hawke blithely cut him off. “I’ll take that as a yes. Lucky thing we have a healer with us, wouldn’t you say?” He pinned Anders with a glittering, gimlet stare and jerked his chin toward Fenris, his lips curled slyly up at the corners.

It was the first time he’d heard the song, yet somehow he remembered it.

\---

It had filled his head with a terrible buzzing. _A song. It **sang**. It did not sing in the Fade; what was it under his skin? Could it be?_

The elf had been all taut, coiled limbs and hard lines, wet with blood and smelling sharply of sweat and shaved iron and the song -- _the smell of the song; the taste of it, humming thin and silver on the air. In his mind’s eye, his gauntleted hands cupped a chipped ring as though it were a treasure, watching in wonder as its watery glow sifted and whorled along his palms and the hinged joints of his fingers. It summoned an ache in him which he had not known he had._

“Avert your eyes, mage.”

“I should heal you with my eyes shut, then? Brilliant idea. I’ll get right on that.” Anders dropped his gaze and worked his fingers between the thorny plates of the elf’s armour, worming tongues of magic mapping sizzling trails along the skin it shielded, seeking torn flesh and bruises.“The worst is just under your ribs. I can take care of the rest with a simple cantrip, but-- _Maker_ , can’t you take this blighted thing off?”

Fenris’ bared teeth flashed bright in the shadows when Anders tapped at his obstructive breastplate. His eyes flicked to focus on a spot just beyond Anders’ shoulder, and he gave a mute, curt nod. Within a moment, the battered cuirass hung open; Anders had barely seen him move. Nearby, Isabela and Hawke traded soft sounds of approval.

_When the enemy is swift, do battle with patience and wisdom. Be ever on your guard._

Anders did not look to gauge the elf’s expression when he shook his head to clear the sticking, alien webs of thought that clustered and clotted there. There was something in the air around him, something in that buzzing sound to which he could not deafen himself, though he was certain he shouldn’t have heard it at all.

He pressed his fingers to the puckered edges of the weeping gash he had sensed, steadied his breath and gently milked the reeking, gluey badness from it. He had felt the sick heat of it trapped tight beneath the skin, rank venom from the clacking maw of one of the fiends now dead around them. _That this mortal would stand to fight, so steadfast, bearing such wounds--_

The pad of his thumb had brushed one of the elf’s winding, ophidian markings. It had flared to life at the touch of his skin and his magic and suddenly, he knew what to call the sound that haunted the heavy air around them.

 _Lyrium_. Lyrium burnt into his skin in patterns like the veins of a leaf. The sound and sapour of it woke something in him, something which bloomed hot and trembling and stretched filmy petals to swath his shuddering mind. _Justice_ shivered before the barbaric beauty of the living world, made manifest in this purest of songs.

Hands like the barbed paws of a beast had knotted in his hair. A fog of muffled voices swirled around him. The hands jerked his head once, twice. Just nearby, Hawke was calling his name. Anders looked up into Fenris’ feral, unblinking gaze.

Had he fainted? 

“Mage.” His voice was like the crackling of nettles under booted feet, Anders reflected. Charred nettles, maybe. The sort that bled sweet, stinging poisons. Fenris gave him an abrupt shake; his teeth rattled. More hands came, clasping and lifting, steadying him by his shoulders--had he fallen? He flicked a feathered tendril of magic over the tight, shining splotch of newly-grown skin marking the dip beneath the elf’s ribs, assuring himself the healing had taken.

Batting the hands away, Anders had mouthed dull reassurances, half-deaf to the words dropping numbly from his lips and choking the blue swell of indignation that rose when he neglected to say truthfully what had overtaken him.

They had left the coast in silence, that day.

\---

_That song_. It had crested the waves of his every waking thought for days after, his mind roiling around the glassy, impossible tones of it. _The sound was something only a spirit could hear. The dreams of mortals were not the same--there was no song to be found, there._

“You alright, there, Blondie?”

He started at the question. Varric sat by, a bemused smile on his face. The dwarf’s voice forever seemed to be teetering on the edge of a low, smoky chuckle. Anders was hunched in a warm, sooty back-corner at the Hanged Man, watching the wet flicker-flare of the firelight catch and dance in the cup of cold tea before him as though it might cure the cluttered mess in his head. He could not recall how he’d come to be there.

He thumbed the lip of his mug, pulling on a crooked grin. “Just thinking--did I ever tell you about the time I went on an expedition into the Wending Wood? There was this stunning Dalish elf; she always looked as though she’d just sat on a thorn bush...”

He spent that night drowning the memory of the song with tales and idle talk. With time, he drove the thought of it from his waking mind.

But Justice never forgot.


	2. Solutio

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a game of strip diamondback and great loss of personal dignity.

He’d begun to forget the shape of his dreams.

Half-curled over his work-bench, with the medicinal stink of crushed herbs catching in his hair and mouth, he scrubbed the morning grit from his eyes and tried to parse the thick black voids in his head. Every morning, for more mornings than he could count.

When the clinic was empty, when the dark rooms were still but for the slow crawling of the dirty Darktown light, he could very nearly tilt his head into the flitting echoes of his dreams. Beneath the shadows and whispers of a Grey Warden’s nightmares, there was a steady pulsing—a cool, blue beacon which scrabbled at the bounds of his consciousness, forever pulling him with it.

So many times, now, he’d woken gasping on bruised knees, his cheek pressed to the flaking wall, murmuring in a voice not his own, which always ceased to speak when he opened his eyes.

It wasn’t a child’s voice, but sometimes it sounded as tender as one. It was a broken croon, all in the slippish colour of pale fire and white mists and rainy evening skies. It was not a voice meant for earthly ears or lips. It never had been.

Anders could almost make out the words—could almost remember, sometimes. _The sound. The song. I cannot–_

 

\---

 

“That’s four to me. Hand over your garments, boys.”

The brassy shock of Isabela’s voice jolted Anders out of his reverie. He sat slumped, staring dumbly at the cards in his hands, the back of his mind alive with an agitated buzzing that contested again and again how _this diversion could serve no purpose._

Aloud, he said, “Which garments, exactly? I have so many.”

Across from him, Varric gamely shrugged out of his leather duster, tossing it to land atop the table with a dry, heavy slap. “Now, now, Blondie; rules are rules. I say you give up the pauldrons.”

“You’re not fooling me, Varric. I think you just want to see me out of my clothes.” Anders prodded the air with one stained, dog-eared card, a watery smile curling his lips when the dwarf pressed a thick hand to his furred chest, looking wounded but for the vanishingly brief, toothy glint of a grin.

A small commotion near the doors of the Hanged Man turned all their heads, a familiar buoyant voice cutting through the hum of the crowd.

“Seems I’ve arrived just in time to watch Isabela strip you to your smalls.” Hawke was picking his way between tables, a satchel slung jauntily over one shoulder and an uneven grin lighting his face. Anders’ lips twitched. “Don’t count me out just yet,” he murmured, wriggling out of his ragged surcoat.

Hawke dropped himself gracelessly into the worn chair beside him, propping his muddy heels against the splintering lip of the table. He groaned and rolled his shoulders, allowing his satchel to fall to the ground with an alarming steely clang and hooking two beckoning fingers in the air between himself and Isabela, where she lounged at the head of the table. “Care to deal two more hands for us, Isabela?”

Isabela’s eyes darted up from the cards flickering between her nimble fingers, flaring like embers in the low light. “Two? You _didn’t—_ ” Something caught her gaze. A satisfied grin sliced slowly across her face. “You _did!_ ”

Hawke spread his hands, looking for all the world like a king expecting tribute. Anders twisted in his seat to peer through the sweaty crush of patrons all around them, a disquieting hum prickling under his skin.

Venomously silent, tense and wild-eyed, Fenris stalked toward them.

 

\---

 

Anders was hardly unaccustomed to Fenris’ presence. Most days, he was a tight, stinging tone at their backs, when Hawke decided to throw the lot of them into the trouble that followed him about like a brewing thunderhead.

This was not the same. _There is far too much silence in this place_ , the blue corners of his mind rumbled, _far too much sloth_. In the spark of battle, dizzy with blood and duty and the bright, restless song of survival, he could hardly hear it. At the heart of all that, under the delicate, gossamer throbbing of mortality, thin as a dragonfly’s beating wing, he could hardly hear the listing, powdery hum trapped under the elf’s sun-browned skin. There, he could overlook how it had become barbed and darkened by the man's bitterness. There, he could surrender himself to the taste of sizzling blood as it thickened the damp air, knowing clearly his purpose. _These soft places could only stain and addle his thoughts._

Varric had long since corralled them up the stairs and into the suite he seemed to consider his own. Isabela, in good spirits and well into her cups, had merrily continued to strip them all of their clothing and personal dignity, once they’d settled. All of them save for Hawke, who sat silent and intent, smiling with eerie serenity from behind the minutely twitching fan of his cards.

With nothing but his trousers and thin under-robe between himself and the creeping chill of a port-city night, Anders sat and shivered and, when his companions noticed the way he tried to shake the snaking buzz from his head, grinned and commented on the cold and the noise and the smell of this place, those fumes could do terrible things to you. His smile and his voice were wan and skin-thin and fragile as light skimming water, he knew, but he found he couldn’t much care.

Fenris drank piss-cheap wine from a chipped, earthenware cup, the tips of his taloned gauntlets tapping along the slow curve of it as though it were delicate and fine, as though his fingers didn’t know what to make of such a thing. His eyes seemed to be on everything but what he had in his hands. With an air of fierce study, he watched the nimble threading of Hawke’s fingers; the dark, bare, freckled flex of Isabela’s shapely thighs; the expansive shrug of Varric’s stocky shoulders.

For all that, though, he never spared Anders a glance, and Anders was silently thankful for it.

They played their hands, and Isabela amassed a pretty pile of boots and gauntlets from Varric and Hawke both, laying claim to Anders’ ragged kerchief and Fenris’ spiked cuirass. When she kicked up her heels to survey her winnings with hooded, sparking eyes hot and irrepressibly alive in the flicker-flare of the firelight, Anders retreated to a shadowed corner and shut his eyes. The night sang. The muffled, silvery sound of it was an ache all its own; a reminder of all that was beautiful in this world.

“What’s got you looking so satisfied, I wonder?”

Anders blinked up into Hawke’s dancing amber gaze. Hawke grinned down at him, toying with a glittering, beaded bauble which Anders only vaguely remembered seeing Isabela tie into his hair.

“I was,” _listening to the sounds of the mortal world; to the song within this very room,_ “... just thinking.” Well. Not his smoothest save, perhaps, but not a lie.

Hawke’s dark brow rose. “Was it about puppies? I hope it was about puppies.”

Anders chuckled, and for a moment didn’t care that it came out sounding like dry reeds. “Of course not. I’m a cat person.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows against his knees and scrubbing a hand through his loosening hair. Of their own accord, his eyes sought and found the cause of the restless, boiling fog at the back of his mind.

Fenris chose that moment to turn his stare back on him.

“Is there something you want, Anders.” The elf’s voice came like the crackling of fire in the relative quiet of Varric’s suite.

Without thinking, Anders replied, his mouth quirking half-dreamily. “You really don’t have the temperament for a slave.”

Fenris’ eyes revealed nothing, cool and dark as damp grass. His stance was that of a hound uneasily at rest, never so loose as to betray him – it made a barbaric sort of sense to know that the rest of him would follow suit. His mouth curled, and when he spoke, he sounded as dispassionate as wet ash.

“Is that a compliment or an insult?”

Justice was not fooled. The song had spiked glistering white-gold.

“I’m just wondering how your master didn’t kill you.” Anders felt Hawke’s eyes on him, felt the strange, nigh-delirious smile overtaking his face.

The tone sharpened, stinging the skin of his mind.

“How have the templars not killed you?” the elf retorted.

It was quick and hot as the snap and flare of a struck match. The cold, scouring blue boiled up within him. _That he would dare!_

Fenris barely lost his composure, but it was enough. It was enough to dust Anders, in his mortal panic, away from that glinting knife’s edge. The elf had bared his teeth, his eyes gone black. A flush darkened his cheeks for all of a second, the hum of his lyrium brands drenching the air.

Anders drew a breath, forced a parody of a smile and crooned, “ _I’m_ charming.”

Weakly, dizzily, dimly, he heard Hawke’s dull sigh, “And here I thought they were getting on so well.”

And then, he fled.

 

\---

 

He sat in the ringing silence of an empty corridor at the far back of the Hanged Man, blotting the meagre light with his hands. It was difficult to breathe. His thoughts twisted into guilty, knotted circles and _it was wrong to bait that man for that pleasure, it was wrong and he fought wrongness in kind, as a sword might parry a sword. Was he not at fault as well, then?_

The creak of another body’s weight before him sent a white shock racing under his skin. When he uncovered his face, there was Fenris, a tenebrous ghost crouching like a spider not a hand’s span away. Giddily, Anders wondered if he might reach out a hand and sweep the creature away, as though he were little more than a floating cobweb.

Before he could speak, Fenris’ talons were biting into the sweat-damp skin of his neck, his iron grip slamming Anders’ head back against the rough wood wall. The elf growled, his voice black as pitch, “Tell me what you did, mage.”

Anders gasped against the crushing, slippery pressure circling his throat, his hands coming up to clasp Fenris’ gauntleted wrist. “ _St--!_ Maker, _stop!_ ”

Fenris hissed and pitched him disdainfully to the side, watching blandly as Anders choked up strings of clear, watery spittle.

_Offer neither compassion nor remorse for such a beast._

“I didn’t --“

“Do not take me for a fool, mage! I felt the touch of your magic!”

The sleeting blaze of it took him utterly. A flare bright as the strange heavens of the living world blinded his eyes and his mind, its song as sharp and cruel as shattered glass, and lovely even for its edges and fissures. Its pearly, hairline fractures spiralled out all around them, taking a shape which mapped the course of a life with no beginning and no end. At its centre was Fenris, lost as he was lost, mortal and frail as he was mortal and frail and _burning with the wild light only a finite thing could own._

They—he— _they_ were crouched over Fenris’ prone body, having brought him to the ground, dipping their head that their mouth might skim the empty, singing air just above his skin, where the brands throbbed bright, searing white lines along his neck, his chin. They— _he_ could taste the slithering iridescence of it with every gasping breath his mortal body took; it popped and sizzled against his parted lips. _He desired but one taste, merely to bow his head and drink of it._

Justice flinched away and took the collar of Fenris’ tunic in hand, straightening to stare down at him with eyes wide and alight with a frigid, alien fire.

“ **Do you seek to ensnare me, fiend? Do you dare?** ”

Below him, Fenris’ body jerked, the tight, pulsing light of him throbbing in time with the weird harmonics of his voice. Deep in the sluggish pits of his mind, Anders stirred and wondered dimly at that, his thoughts all wet, tattered lumps in disarray.

In that moment, there was a stillness which tasted of glass, and the moist snarl of a desperate animal. Four bright-hot, red lines slashed across his face, and as he was toppled back, the world frayed around him.

 

\---

 

Anders had woken to an empty hall and a gritty, swollen pain in his face. Blood had dried to crust along his cheek and lips, matting his unbound hair.

He couldn’t have said how long he stood in that dark place after he’d healed the raw, ragged wounds he’d sported, clinging like a child to the power of his own name. He was Anders.

He winched his eyes shut.

Anders. Anders. _Anders._

“Anders!”

A dagger whispered past his face, embedding itself in the wall beyond with a dry, splintery _thok_. He had whirled on the balls of his feet before the razor-thin itch of the passing blade had faded from the bridge of his nose, falling into a defensive crouch. His resolve sputtered when his gaze fell upon Isabela, standing with hands set squarely on her ample hips, the flush of wine a heady warmth under her dark skin.

“Oh, _that_ got your attention, did it?” She pulled a face at the sight of him. “ _Balls_. You look like last week’s catch.”

Anders faltered. Isabela’s features rearranged themselves as deftly and imperceptibly as a card trick.

With surprising wiry strength, she hoisted him to his feet. “Come on, then. I’ve still got the rest of your clothes to win.”


End file.
